Google Faces EU Probe Over Doped Search Results 193
Barence writes "The EU has launched an investigation into whether Google is deliberately doctoring its search results to favour its own services. The search giant stands accused of artificially lowering the search ranking of competing price-comparison sites in organic and paid-for search results, in favour of Google Shopping. 'There is a growing chasm between the enduring public perception of Google's search results as comprehensive and impartial, and the reality that they are increasingly neither,' said Shivaun Raff, CEO of British price comparison site Foundem, which lodged the complaint with the EU. Google has denied any foul play. 'Those sites have complained and even sued us over the years, but in all cases there were compelling reasons why their sites were ranked poorly by our algorithms,' it claims."
Was bound to happen (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure who's side I'm on this time. I mean, it'd be stupid if (say) you google something on Bing and you don't get the Microsoft solution first. I think it'd be weird if you look up "Shopping" and google shopping is at the bottom.
Re:Hope Google wins, for the sake of useful result (Score:4, Interesting)
Agreed - these price-comparison sites are almost universally leeches. They provide no added content, the contents are often out-of-date, and you can get the same functionality by just clicking on individual links in Google. I wish they would all go away. That said, I have never seen Google shopping come up in the results of a search for a product. I am always skipping over spammed results from other price comparison sites - not to mention eBay (I hate eBay). If Google is cheating, they surely are doing a lousy job of it :-)
According to one article, Foundem is a case study in SEO fail [econsultancy.com]. Perhaps it's easier to sue than to fix your business concept.
Web directories (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:Hope Google wins, for the sake of useful result (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry to say, but that article was written by a clueless moron who just argues that any price comparison site must fail at SEO, which a) is obviously wrong and b) would mean that Google Products would also never warrant a top position since all its content is as problematic as the author wants to make us believe Foundem's is.
Google Products is actually much better. Compare this Foundem search [foundem.co.uk] and the per-product pages [foundem.co.uk] with Google Product [google.co.uk] and its per-product pages [google.co.uk]. The Google pages offer more useful information up-front, avoid redundant duplication, and are generally better designed.
Even this probably wouldn't warrant a top position for Google Products on most searches, and it doesn't generally get one. What Google does is use it to supplement its search results - if you make a search where Google thinks the Products search results are useful [google.co.uk], it displays them as well as the generic web search results. This makes sense - Google wants to offer the best web search results it can, and sometimes that means presenting them in the Google Product format.
Note that Bing does exactly the same thing [bing.com] with ciao.co.uk, which Microsoft also owns and which was one of the other complainants. Except that Microsoft totally screwed this up - the ciao.co.uk pages [ciao.co.uk] lack useful information like prices and website names, making them less useful than generic internet search!
It's no wonder that Bing and ciao.co.uk have a much smaller marketshare than Google - they're useless.
Re:I shop online all the time (Score:3, Interesting)
The slashdot "we" who implicitly know about other search engines?
The facebook/IM "we" who can transmit news of how well a search engine works instantaneously to other users?
The grandma "we" who just accepts what her grandson set up?
Your bullshit argument is that google got where they are by being good, but now they're abusing their position. Personally, I think you're confusing google with Microsoft, but if you could show, you know, some evidence that is more compelling than the whining of a bunch of bogus "search engine" firms that just repackage content in an ad-heavy environment, I would be interested in seeing that.
However, I wouldn't be interested at all in seeing google cater to those losers. I have never thought "man, google's results suck because they don't show me enough parasite link farm sites!" Quite the opposite -- whenever the link farms manage to game the system enough that they get ranked highly at google, I get pissed at google for not weeding their garden quickly enough.
Re:I shop online all the time (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not just that. For example, one of the complainants was ciao.co.uk, a Microsoft subsidiary which is integrated into Bing search results in exactly the same fashion as Google Shopping is into Google search results. Except that they did a rather worse job of it than Google.
Compare: Google [google.co.uk] versus Bing [bing.com]. If you click one of the product links in the Google search, you get a nice clean list [google.co.uk] of who sells that product and at what price. Do the same in Bing, and you get something rather less pleasant [ciao.co.uk]. The search results are below the fold, on one web browser information like price and retailer name is off-screen entirely, and even on something more mainstream the results take up so much vertical space that price comparison is a real pain!
Google is popular because the competition suck more.